Sunday, November 30, 2008

When it comes to global warming, newspapers play up stories that reinforce the prevalent the-sky-is-falling belief that global warming is human-caused and catastrophic. But if a study or scientist does not portend the end of the world as we know it, it rarely rates as news.

In that spirit, many papers (including The Chronicle) have reported on a UC San Diego science historian who reviewed 928 abstracts of peer-reviewed articles on global warming published between 1993 and 2003, and concluded, "Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position."

Over 10 years, not one study challenged the orthodoxy - does that sound right to you? If that were true, it would strongly suggest that, despite conflicting evidence in this wide and changing world, no scientist dares challenge the politically correct position on the issue.

No wonder David Bellamy - an Australian botanist who was involved in some 400 TV productions, only to see his TV career go south after he questioned global warming orthodoxy - wrote in the Australian last week, "It's not even science any more; it's anti-science." Bellamy notes that official data show that "in every year since 1998, world temperatures have been getting colder, and in 2002, Arctic ice actually increased." Exhibit B: MIT Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences Richard S. Lindzen recently wrote, "There has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995."

The only thing surprising for level headed non-alarmists here is the fact that this is coming from the SF Chronicle.